


Warm Night, Cold Day

by languageintostillair



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Ficlet, Season/Series 10, The X-Files Revival, XF Writing Challenge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-07 04:06:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12832932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/languageintostillair/pseuds/languageintostillair
Summary: A sunflower seed, twice adrift.





	Warm Night, Cold Day

**Author's Note:**

> Something short originally posted on Tumblr (now slightly edited). Written a year and a half ago in response to one of leiascully's XF Writing Challenge prompts: For Better or For Worse. I played with the idea of one “worse” and then one “better” scenario, centred around the same object.

 

It was a warm night. 

She was wearing one of his T-shirts; on her, it was big enough to maintain her modesty to no one in particular. Air met skin beneath cotton, and she convinced herself that she wore it for ventilation and not emotion. It was more cloth than required considering the temperature, yet too little to give her the comfort she couldn’t admit she needed. She tried not to think about how that T-shirt came to be in her apartment.

When she sat down on her couch, she felt something small and round (but sharp at the same time) pressing into the underside of her thigh. Her fingers slipped down, but couldn’t find their way to the offending object. Sighing, she got up, and gave those same fingers the leeway to pluck out a sunflower seed that had adhered to her skin. It left an imprint, small and round and sharp.

She held the seed between her fingers for a moment too long, wondering how it had been transported to her couch, and how long it had been there ( _how long since…_ ). Thoughts of the seed’s intended destination were threatening the horizon of her mind. Thoughts of teeth and tongue.

She threw the seed in the trash.

Back on the couch, her legs curled underneath her, she flipped absentmindedly through a medical journal that could just as well have been a shopping catalogue. Involuntarily, or perhaps necessarily, one hand travelled down to the spot on her skin where the seed had left its mark. An indirect indentation of him. It belonged to him as much as the ones he left on her hips when…

She noticed the imprint was already shallower than it was thirty seconds ago. 

She felt the weight of impermanence. 

 

//////////

 

It was a cold day. 

She was wearing a pantsuit she had just bought two days ago; its newness felt strange in a setting so timeworn. Driving down a road to nowhere, in the passenger seat next to him, steeped in the echoes of their most-recently-concluded case-related parley. In aged silence, she stared out the window at the never-ending stream of grey sky, which yawned over evergreen forest, which loomed over cracked asphalt. Her warm breath fogged the cool glass and her fingers brushed the case file in her lap. She thought of every single time she had been in a rental car with him, all at once.

When she adjusted a little in her seat, she felt something small and round (but sharp at the same time) pressing into the underside of her thigh. She already knew what it was. Her fingers slipped down, awkwardly, and located the offending object.

She sensed his eyes drift toward her hand as she pinched the sunflower seed between her fingers. Her eyebrow arched in a way reserved just for him, in a way she once thought she had to archive.

She placed the seed on the dashboard.

It trembled, slightly, as he drove, but stayed in the general vicinity of its original place. She half expected him to disregard its questionable past and eat it anyway. He didn’t. The seed persisted, a quivering monument to more than twenty years of windshield solidarity and those one or five backseat indiscretions and all the voids that gaped in between. It was his habit, eating sunflower seeds, but he had done it so often in her presence that it felt like hers too, somehow.

She didn’t notice that he had reached over to her side of the vehicle until his fingers threaded through hers.

She felt the lightness of promise.


End file.
